Conventional electronic sensors are used in various industrial and commercial applications, for example, whereby certain transducer-type device may measure a physical condition and generate an electrical signal which represents such measured condition. Conventional sensors, however, typically generate analog signals and are not designed to interface easily to digital networks. Although more recently, electronic industry attention has increasingly turned toward coupling so-called embedded processing elements to digital networks, such recent approaches provide limited capability in processing multi-sensor systems, particularly for digital networks.